Apparently you’ve never seen the menu at The Cheesecake Factory.
But it doesn’t address my point at all. There are an awful lot of uncontrolled variables in such experiments. That changing the inputs will lead to a change of behavior is something I think both sides would agree with. Ditto with internal states. Some prisoners make trouble, some are model prisoners. Neither is evidence for either side.
We’re rewatching The Prisoner. Number Six reacts to his situation far differently from the others in the Village. Was he forced to do that by his background, or was it his own free will? Impossible to tell.
I’m not following this point at all. If you understand that discussions of situations like prison is just a more constrained set of options, then what’s the relevance to free will and determinism?
Is there anyone that would argue that a choice between coffee and tea is not free will, but a choice between coffee, tea or soda is?
Unlike the prisoner, we can observe him and the prison. Or to make it more layered, seeing that could make voters remove the guys in power that funded such a bizarre jail.
Since there are more restrictions in prison to one’s free will, then the difference between being there and living outside, offers a chance to check the pro and against positions a bit.
I don’t think all will change, but the point to me is that there is a difference. You can see it as small, but that difference IMHO should not exist if we insist that limiting one’s free in a situation like that will make no difference.
No, as I understand it, the concept of free will doesn’t have anything to do with external limitations or restrictions on what a person can choose to do.
Reality is not reducible to a series of either/or choices. Reality is indistinguishable from free will because a metaphorical infinity of choices are parsed at every second of existence. Nobody behaves as if a choice if coffee over tea is dictated by some outside force and will reliably repeat is time could be replayed. Determinists must therefore explain why reality seemed to be interchangeable with free will. “Because it must be so” is indistinguishable from “because I said so.”
I see “because it must be so” to be scientifically unsound. It is arbitrary, unsourced, unprovable, unfalsifiable, and nonexplanatory. It is also indistinguishable from a god-like creator figure running the universe. I reject that a priori for scientific reasons.
I admit that I would like better scientific support for any answer. We simply don’t know enough - I would even argue anything of significance - about how the brain works, what consciousness is, how memory, imagination, creativity, dreams, language, etc. is handled. If you were to argue that determinism is a philosophical viewpoint you cling to until actual scientific evidence for anything creates a solid base to extrapolate from, I would back off and agree to wait. However, without that base I’m unable to find any holds on the fuzzy cloud of your assertions.
I don’t really see how. And, to clarify my position: I don’t consider myself “pro” or “against” per se. I think the statements “We have free will” and “We don’t have free will” to be equally meaningless, because the concept of free will is incoherent.
It’s why I think talk of determinism is a red herring, and hypotheticals about how limited our choices are at a given instant is irrelevant too.
The universe puts a metaphorical gun to my head all the time; when I have pains or various “calls of nature”. I don’t think even believers in free will would claim that I temporarily am not a free agent. They would just acknowledge that some situations have fewer good choices than others.
IMHO, many do not want to deal with the differences and what it does to the free will discussions, because it can show that there are ways to check for what I think is an item that shows emergence. When many small things together create new fundamental traits that didn’t exist before.
In the big picture, that is likely the current state of affairs; but the way I see it, this is a human emergent property that is showing first as mostly a concept in our minds. IMHO it is not so weird to realize that when many small things get together they create new fundamental traits that didn’t exist before.
I gave the example of someone psychologically constrained from doing certain actions, which seems a much better example than prison.
I shackle you to a dungeon wall and shout “aha! Thus free will is refuted!” I don’t think so.
In my example our inability to do certain things might be internal states, our genes, and/or external inputs, our moral training as children. Most likely “and.” That just proves we don’t have unconstrained free will, but I doubt too many people think we have.
And I’m not coming down on the side of determinism. If our actions are determined, it is in a way that we can never predict, and so it is functionally equivalent to them not being determined exactly.
I’ll not say any more since I’m this close to thread shitting.
I didn’t think that anything you’ve said came anywhere close to threadshitting. Then again, I’m not sure what the purpose of this thread is. It’s apparently a spinoff of another thread that I haven’t read.
I’m inclined to agree with you when you say
I’m pretty sure I’ve said this before in other such threads, but I’m convinved that we have either free will or the illusion of free will, and I don’t see a way to determine which of these is true, without relying on assumptions that not everyone shares and that essentially amount to begging the question.
And because it seems to be, as you say, unfalsifiable, I’m not sure what practical difference it makes which way one believes.
Neither do I, the point I was making was about Determinists not willing to check the differences between being in Prison or in induced altered states in relation to Free will. The level of having choices in a restaurant is clearly not the same as the level seen in Jail.
I’m more convinced now that falling for that is just putting the discussion as being the poster boy of the fallacy of the excluded middle.
This basic comment, said far more nastily, is exactly what I am avoiding. But I think you have phrased it well.
Which is not the same as having pure free will or being a deterministic robot.
Which makes me think of a solution. John Maynard Keynes solution to the hard solipism problem (which I know he didn’t invent, but I read his book) was saying that knowledge was not absolute but some kind of probability. Maybe we can define a free will metric. By that metric the restaurant patron has more free will than the prisoner, who has more than an AI. The metric would have to be multidimensional with weighting required to come up with a final number. (And philosophers can have fun arguing about what the weights should be.)
That sounds fair. IMHO there are a lot of factors that show to me that there are not only values, (could be very small, but values nonetheless) but that there are also levels of what one could call “Free Will”.
One short fun video from Kurzgesagt (In a Nutshell) “Do You Have a Free Will?” that deals with the ideas of levels and emergence:
Interesting. As a computer scientist I know all about levels. You can theoretically understand internet protocols by studying transistors, but it isn’t very useful.
Emergence still depends on the nature of lower levels, even if we are unable to predict it just looking at lower levels. It’s process versus program.
I agree with their conclusion - whether or not we have free will, it looks like we do, so who really cares. But the emergent mind making decisions which affect our internal state which affects future decisions could be viewed as free will, if you treat the mind as a special entity, or not, if you treat it as coming from more or less deterministic components (with the caveat about quantum indeterminancy they mention.
So I guess if free will makes you feel good, we have it. If it doesn’t, we don’t. It depends on how you view the mind.
One point I’ve seen made in the past is that a belief in free will is useful for the powerful and predatory to encourage, because it makes people easier to manipulate and indoctrinate. People who believe in free will are less likely to take the first step in resisting manipulation; recognizing that they are vulnerable to manipulation in the first place.
But it’s not? Reality looks to be a combination of determinism and quantum randomness, and doesn’t resemble “free will” at all. People have reasons for the things they do, they respond to stimuli and their own history; they can be predicted by others and by themselves.
A world of free will would be a world of madness. A world without cause and effect, where thought, action and desire would be disconnected from each other. Where someone could intend to eat dinner and jump off a cliff instead, or try to give someone a hug and beat them to death instead. A world without freedom or choice because everyone is acting according the the magical acausal black box in their head, not according to their wants, needs or intentions. i don’t think it would even be survivable, much less desirable.
That’s just not right. ‘A combination of determinism and randomness’ is exactly what a world with free will would look like, if described in a theoretical model. Because again, the best one can do to describe the generation of new information not reducible to any prior data plus transformations thereof is to add a source of randomness—this is just mathematics. If there is any way of bringing new information into the world, it will look like a combination of determinism and randomness, because again the postulate of randomness is just a way of abstaining from any further speculation—a black box. There is no theoretical model of how a given random bit of data is created: no computable process—and that’s all theoretical models are—can do so.
What people see as a problem with free will is just the problem of ultimate origins that we always hit when we trace an explanation to its logical end—we will either find circularity, as in e.g. the ‘aseity’ of theological traditions of a god that creates itself, or dogmatism as in the postulate of randomness, which states that new information just spontaneously pops into existence, or infinite regress, as in the Basic Argument against free will, or of course an eternally existing universe (the already mentioned Münchhausen trilemma). We typically don’t let that worry us, just accepting as black boxes the origin of the universe and the creation of random bits—which is, I think, the only justified proposition: nobody ever told us theoretical modeling could account for everything.
But when it comes to free will, those same issues are claimed to make it ‘incoherent’. If that’s true, then so is randomness, and so is the existence of the universe—so is every way of bringing new information into existence, because they are all equivalent.
No; free will is supposed to be neither random nor determined.